Nine Lives
by Aconitum-Napellus
Summary: Illya decides to get a kitten - or, a kitten decides to get him. The trouble is, he can't find her. Gen.


'I'm worried about her,' Illya said, from his position on his front on the parquet floor. The whole room took on an odd aspect from this angle. This was what it must be like to be four inches tall.

Napoleon sighed. He was standing near the door, dressed in his best suit, obviously impatient to leave. 'I tell you, Illya, there's absolutely nothing to be worried about. She can take care of herself. They're born ready to take care of themselves.'

Illya huffed in return. 'That shows how much you know about cats. Napoleon, they are born blind and utterly dependent on their mothers. They can't survive alone until they're at least six weeks old.'

Napoleon jerked his sleeve up a little and looked at his watch.

'In that case you certainly have nothing to worry about. She's ten weeks, isn't she? She's probably hunting somewhere.'

The frown didn't lift from Illya's face. He swivelled around on his front and peered into the small gap underneath the sofa. He shone a torch in, but all he could see were dust bunnies and what might have been a sock. He poked his hand underneath but he couldn't reach the sock. It would have to stay there.

'She's not under there,' he said.

'It's a closed apartment. She hasn't gotten out,' Napoleon said wearily.

'Air vents, Napoleon,' Illya said rather tersely. There were so many nooks and crannies for something as small as a kitten, once you started looking for them.

'She hasn't gotten out through the air vents, either. There aren't any gaps big enough.'

Illya rolled onto his back and inspected the cuff of his shirt. It was flecked with dust and hair, and he brushed it off disgustedly.

'I think you need to clean under there,' Napoleon pointed out rather unnecessarily.

'I have better things to do with my time,' Illya said darkly.

'So you decided that on top of all those things, you'd get a kitten?'

'Mrs Tomasovna is very happy to look after her when I'm away. I'm a grown man, Napoleon. If I decide to get a cat, that is my decision.'

'And when you spend half an hour scurrying around on the floor when we're supposed to be going out to dinner?' Napoleon asked him huffily. 'What about then?'

Illya sighed, using his stomach muscles to crunch up into a sitting position. He drew his knees up and rested his arms on them.

'I can't go out until I know she's all right,' he said, trying to sound patient when in fact he felt anything but. He was deeply worried about the kitten. He wondered if Napoleon had ever had a pet. 'If we have to miss the chance to eat at – '

'At Di Angelo's, Illya. I've had that table booked for a month. You know how hard it is to get in there.'

Illya dusted some of the dirt from his sleeves, and then sneezed. Maybe Napoleon was right about the cleaning, much as he hated to admit it. The dust probably wasn't doing his allergies any good.

'I'm sorry, Napoleon,' he said. 'Why don't you call up a girlfriend and ask her to go with you? I'm sure there are a hundred women who would love to have dinner with you.'

'Because I want to go with you,' Napoleon said, his voice softened now. 'We've been in seventeen different countries in the last two weeks. We've only had three normal twenty-four hour days in all that time, with the amount of time zones we've crossed. We've killed a dozen men and foiled five separate Thrush schemes. We've had to manage in multiple languages and as many disguises. Most of our meals have been snatched bites to eat or airplane dinners. I've had this table booked since before we started off on that crazy merry-go-round, and I was praying we'd make it back to be able to have one calm, quiet, proper meal together. But in the time between stepping back onto American soil and tonight, you decided, in your wisdom, to get a cat.'

'It's not so much that I chose the cat, as that she chose me,' Illya said in a rather muted tone.

He hadn't gone out looking for a cat. It was that he had seen Mr Williams walking down the hall last night with this mewling thing in a cardboard box, and Illya had asked him about it, and Mr Williams had told him that it was the last one of the litter, that no one wanted a cat, that he was on his way to the river…

He smiled and said again, 'I'm sorry, Napoleon. She was a last minute thing. I would have cat-proofed the apartment. But she didn't have anyone else to take her. The man was going to drown her...'

He saw the change in Napoleon's brown eyes. It was something that was very hard to describe; a kind of softening that showed him moving towards sympathy with Illya's position. He knew that he was winning him over.

'All right,' he said. 'All right. So, after saving the world five times over you saved this kitten, this – What's she called?'

Illya looked down at his dusty fingers, coughed a bit of dust out of his throat, and said, 'She's called Burr.'

'Um.' Napoleon cocked his head on one side. 'Purr?'

'Burr,' Illya repeated. 'Her name is Burr.'

'And that's a – Is it a Russian thing?'

He felt himself going a little pink. 'No, it's not a Russian thing.'

'She's named after Raymond Burr? Illya, are you a closet fan of Perry Mason?'

'No,' Illya said impatiently, getting to his feet and brushing lint from his trouser legs. 'It's the name of the first woman to achieve a PhD in physics from Cambridge. Katharine Burr Blodgett. I couldn't exactly call the kitten Blodgett, and Katharine seemed too stately for a scrap of fur like that. So I called her Burr.'

'Well,' Napoleon said with a grin. 'She was a pretty girl, was she?'

'Napoleon, the woman gained her PhD in physics at one of the world's most prestigious institutions in 1926,' Illya said rather haughtily. 'A time when most women were expected to be nothing more than homemakers and quiet subordinates to men. She studied with Ernest Rutherford. She's never married. She lives with another woman somewhere – oh, I'm not sure where – but she lives and works without the support of a husband.'

'Oh,' Napoleon said knowingly, and Illya tutted.

'I don't know what relationship she has with this woman, Napoleon. Trust your mind to go to the gutter. Anyway, I heard about her when I was completing my PhD at Cambridge, and I thought this cat deserved a name that would set her off well in life. An independent, successful female who has overcome the odds.'

'Well, presupposing your cat won't become a great in world physics, perhaps she'll learn to excel at mouse hunting,' Napoleon smiled. 'But right now it would be good if you could improve your cat hunting technique, because I'm hungry, and I really don't want to miss this chance to eat at Di Angelo's. We have all of five minutes before we have to leave, and you still need to change.'

Illya looked around the apartment, assessing the windows and doors as if he were doing a sweep of a hotel room when Thrush were in the area. There weren't any gaps in the windows big enough to admit a kitten, even the most determined one. It was winter and if any of the windows were open he would be able to feel it. She could be in any room, but she couldn't get out. Napoleon was right about the air vents. They really weren't big enough for an animal like that to get through. They were small enough to stop rats, at least.

'All right,' he said finally. 'All right, Napoleon. I think she's safe in here. We will go to Di Angelo's. I'll look for her again when we get back.'

'Leave a dish of milk out for her,' Napoleon suggested. 'It might tempt her out.'

So Illya slipped through into the kitchen and poured out a saucer of milk, then he went to get changed. He had been looking forward to this night out too, and it didn't seem fair to Napoleon to let a kitten stop it.

((O))

'Hell,' Napoleon said when they got back, and saw the kicked open door.

Illya stood there in the hallway for a moment, just assessing what was in front of him. It never did to rush in after something like this. It could have been anything from simple burglary to Thrush. He knelt by the door frame, looking for tripwires across the gap.

'Looks clean,' he said, but he drew his gun anyway.

Napoleon had his communicator out and was calling headquarters.

'Yes, a break-in at Mr Kuryakin's apartment,' he said. 'We don't know who it was yet, but we need a clean-up team to come help us secure it.'

'A run of the mill burglar would have tripped the alarm,' Illya murmured, looking about the doorway and running his fingers along the wire that led to the device. 'Yes, look,' he said, pulling at a cut end. 'They cut straight through. They must have been quick. The alarm would have sounded before they'd managed to cut it, but they must have shut it off before anyone came to see what the noise was about.'

'They must have kicked the door down later,' Napoleon said. 'For appearances sake, probably when they left. They'd know you'd know someone had been in as soon as you saw the alarm was cut, so they tried to make it look like an ordinary burglary.'

'An ordinary burglar would never have been able to silence the alarm fast enough,' Illya murmured.

Inside, the place had been ransacked. The coffee table was overturned, the sofa cushions scattered over the floor, curtains torn down, books pulled from the shelves and ripped apart and pages scattered like autumn leaves.

'God, I'm sorry, Illya,' Napoleon murmured.

Illya was just looking, feeling half numb and half very, very angry.

'Someone needs to send a memo to Thrush to tell them that nothing sensitive is allowed to leave U.N.C.L.E. HQ,' he said darkly. 'They can't have found anything of use to them.'

'No,' Napoleon said slowly, 'except those things that _are_ of use to them. Things you don't need to take away.'

Illya looked at him, wondering what on earth he meant.

'Psychology,' Napoleon explained. 'All those lovely tidbits that tell them what kind of man you are. The aftershave you use, the books you read, the records you listen to.'

Suddenly, Illya felt naked. It was an unpleasant feeling indeed. He hated to think of Thrush rummaging through his most personal possessions, making notes, perhaps, on his choice of underwear and brand of toothpaste, on the medicines in his medicine cabinet. He was glad he kept his few family photos safely in a locked box in his office at headquarters. Then another realisation dropped down through him.

'Napoleon, what about Burr?' he asked. He picked his way through the mess to the kitchen, where his cupboards had been turned out and his chairs were on their backs. The saucer of milk was empty and all the cat food he had put out earlier was gone, but there was no sign of the kitten.

He stood there, dismayed, unsure of what to do. He didn't usually feel so helpless. Maybe this was the pay-off for bringing something to love into his life. Maybe that was what brought the feeling of vulnerability.

Napoleon came crunching over broken crockery into the kitchen.

'I'm sorry, Illya,' he said softly. 'The door must have been wide open for at least an hour. I guess she's gone.'

He felt as if something had dropped out from beneath his lungs. That poor ten week old kitten. She had hardly had a chance of life. He couldn't imagine her surviving long, or well, on the streets, especially at this time of year. He felt curiously like sitting down and crying.

He drew in a sharp breath, and started to pick up packets of food and tins and put them back in the cupboards. It was ridiculous to cry over a kitten.

'Illya,' Napoleon said, putting a hand on his arm. 'This food'll all have to be gotten rid of, you know. Thrush could have spiked anything. The whole place will need going over to check for devices or poisons. Why don't you come sleep at my place tonight?'

'Of course,' he murmured. He had forgotten about that. 'Thank you, Napoleon. But, no. No, I don't need to sleep at your place. I'll sleep here.'

'There's going to be a team from HQ over here in the next few minutes to go over everything and secure it,' Napoleon reminded him.

'Yes, I know,' he said. 'I'll help with that. Don't worry about me, Napoleon. You go home if you want to. I'll help the team and then I'll go to bed. It's all right.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Napoleon said immediately. 'I'll stay and help. Why don't we start on the books?'

((O))

Illya had fallen into bed, exhausted, at past two in the morning. They had spent hours going over the apartment, checking every book, every record sleeve, the workings of the refrigerator and the television, bagging up the food to be thrown away, looking through his clothes to be sure nothing had been planted in them. Five listening devices had been found, but nothing else. In a way, that was a reassurance. If they wanted to listen to him they didn't want to kill him. They had known they couldn't break in without it being noticed, so they had made it look like a simple burglary. If the U.N.C.L.E. team had found nothing it would have been more worrying, but the listening devices were there; very well hidden, but there. Since they had been found, Thrush's ploy had failed.

At last the U.N.C.L.E. men had gone home, and it had just been him and Napoleon left behind. He told Napoleon to go home but Napoleon told him firmly that he was staying, _just in case_. In case of what, Illya wasn't sure. The door had been replaced and the alarm repaired, so it was no more likely that anyone would get in than it was on any other night. But he had to admit that he was glad of Napoleon's company.

'I'll sleep on the sofa,' Napoleon told him. 'Don't worry, I know where the sheets are. I'll make myself up a bed and then I'll be ready to tackle anything that goes bump in the night.'

'The whole apartment has been checked, Napoleon,' Illya said rather wearily, but he was still glad that Napoleon was staying.

'Better safe than sorry,' Napoleon said, and went to find the sheets.

Illya went to bed too tired to think straight, glad that U.N.C.L.E. had sent a team over so quickly, that they had been so efficient and found what they were looking for, but worried about that scrap of a kitten. He had only known her for a little over twenty-four hours, but still, she had pushed her way into his heart. She hadn't been seen by any of the men combing his apartment. He and Napoleon hadn't caught a glimpse of her. She couldn't possibly be in here any more. He would have to accept that she was gone.

He lay there trying to make his spine relax, staring up at the dimness of the ceiling above him. His back and his shoulders ached from stooping and straightening and leafing through all of his books. His apartment still looked like a mess, and he would have to replace half of his crockery and glass. They had taken his bottles of liquor and a billfold of cash, presumably to make it look more like a burglary. U.N.C.L.E. would cover some of that, at least. It pained him more that some of his books had been ripped apart. It pained him even more still that the kitten was gone.

He told himself sternly that it was ridiculous trying to keep a pet. Perhaps this was a warning that it was a foolish idea. Mrs Tomasovna had promised eagerly to look after her in her own apartment when Illya was away, but wouldn't that be an odd life for a cat? Was it fair to have a creature that he was away from so often, that one day he might never come home to?

He pulled his covers up to his chin and turned onto his side and tried to fall asleep. He was so tired that, despite his mixed feelings, sleep came quickly.

((O))

There was something touching his shoulder. He came awake in an instant, eyes snapping open onto darkness, trying to parse the meaning of that warm weight that was pressing against him. He almost sat up, but then he realised that he could hear, he could feel, purring. He reached a hand up in the darkness and felt the kitten, nestled in against his shoulder and neck, purring so deeply that her entire body was vibrating. Her stomach felt so fat it was like a ball against his hand.

He lay there for a moment, not sure if he even dared to move, lest he disturb that tiny bundle of fur. Then he inched an arm out cautiously and found the switch on his bedside lamp. He turned it on, and a soft yellow glow lit the room. He glanced obliquely down to see the little tabby and white kitten, fur ruffled from his hand stroking her, her eyes blinking sleepily. Her mouth opened in a wide, pink yawn, and her tongue stretched and curved into an endearing curl, flanked by tiny, needle teeth.

'Napoleon!' he hissed softly towards the open bedroom door. He was still ridiculously hesitant to disturb the cat.

There was a sudden thump from the other room, and then Napoleon appeared, wearing only a t-shirt and underpants, gun in hand.

'Put that away!' Illya whispered. 'Look!'

Napoleon stood still for a moment, looking dazed. Then he lowered his gun and rubbed his eyes and asked, 'Illya, can you tell me what I'm supposed to be looking at?'

'Look,' Illya said again. He stroked the kitten, and she stood and arched her back. Purring, she rubbed her fluffy side against his face.

'The kitten!' Napoleon whispered, then asked, 'Er, we're both awake. Why are we whispering?'

'The kitten,' Illya said softly, and Napoleon laughed.

'Well, she's awake too, so let's talk normally. Listen, why don't I make us a cup of coffee?'

Illya grimaced, but Napoleon probably couldn't see that through the mouthful of kitten.

'I don't have any cups any more,' he said mournfully, 'and we had to throw all the coffee away. Mr Waverly is going to be very upset when I put in my expenses this month.'

'Ah, well,' Napoleon murmured. He came over to sit on the edge of Illya's bed, reaching out a hand to stroke the kitten. 'So this is Burr? Good to meet you, little lady. You know, I was starting to wonder if she was a figment of your imagination. She must have just been skulking from place to place in the apartment while we were all tidying up. She'd make a good agent, I think.'

Illya smiled through the warm fur that was still pressed against his face.

'I'm hoping she'll grow up to be a nuclear physicist,' he said.


End file.
